The fat is in the fire and Bengali nationalism is spiralling over the insult to the mother tongue. Calling the language “Bangladeshi” was a mistake made by a possibly ignorant policeman overwhelmed by the noise of the Bharatiya Janata Party’s obsession with purifying West Bengal from the incursion of illegal infiltrators. 

Compounding the mistake by defending it on the basis of an invented reason: “there is no language called Bengali,” is BJP spokesperson and media czar Amit Malviya’s contribution to declaring war on the language and gifting Mamata Banerjee the credibility she needed to hoist her tactical Bhasha Andolan call into a Bengali nationalist movement in defence of the mother tongue. It has bailed her out at a politically tough moment when despite her popularity among the masses, there is widespread discontent about the government and the Trinamool Congress she heads.

Bengalis are outraged by the poverty of the BJP leadership’s understanding of the difference between script, which is standard Bengali, and the glorious banquet of dialects in which it is spoken on the west and east bank of the Bhagirathi, delineating the difference between West Bengal and East Bengal, two homelands of the same language. It has for now angered Bengalis to the point that there is a popular sentiment that the BJP cannot represent the Bengali speaking. The political isolation of the BJP over the “Bangladeshi language” issue has made the ruling Trinamool Congress and the Left, of which the Communist Party of India Marxist is the dominant party, into strange bedfellows.   

Jadavpur University Professor Emerita of English and a distinguished scholar, Supriya Chaudhuri says that all the different versions of Bengali spoken in the districts are “dialects of Bengali.” In other words, there is Bengali and there are the dialects. She explains that it is a historical accident that the Shantipur (district Nadia on the west bank of the Bhagirathi) dialect as developed in Kolkata became standardised.

I feel very strongly about this row and the ignorant attempt to construct a “Bangladeshi” language different from “ours,” since I come from an East Bengali family who habitually spoke the Vikrampur dialect at home. Vikrampur is a suburb of Dhaka.

Questions are being raised, because Bengalis are exasperated and determined to draw blood; “is Punjabi and Urdu then Pakistani?” meaning, if Bangla can become Bangladeshi in the politically fevered minds of the BJP obsessed for the past 35 odd years with finding illegal immigrants then Punjabi can also become Pakistani. The obsession does create a piquant problem for small language communities like the Sindhis or the people from Multan. The two provinces, Sindh and Multan, are in Pakistan; is their language Pakistani?

Some people in Assam, Meghalaya, Arunachal Pradesh and the majority in Tripura, speak Bengali; those Bengali speakers are instantly identifiable because of the way in which they use the language and their accents. The difference is real; the language spoken by BJP’s Leader of the Opposition in West Bengal Suvendu Adhikari is different from that spoken by BJP’s Tripura ex-chief minister Biplab Kumar Deb. Had the BJP bothered to listen to how these leaders spoke, then it could have avoided trapping itself in the language war it seems to have inadvertently initiated by igniting Bengali nationalism. 

And then there is Hindi, a language invented by the British, John Borthwick Gilchrist of Fort William in Kolkata, possibly because in the babel of dialects in the barracks, a standardised version was needed to manage with efficiency the structure of command and control. The 2001 Census indicates that there are 49 languages-dialects that are classified as Hindi. The People’s Language Survey of India produced by G.N. Devy listed many more dialects that have been classified as Hindi. And the PLSI survey found that language when it is in use can resurface as an official language as happened with Konkani when the state of Goa was formed. Earlier Konkani was grouped as a dialect of Marathi. If Bengali is not a language then neither is Hindi or for that matter Gujarati, Marathi, because there are differences between the dialects spoken in different parts of different states. 

The magisterial work on the Origin and Development of the Bengali Language by Suniti Kumar Chattopadhyay is an invaluable study on the history and evolution of the language, which borrowed and integrated words from Arabic, Turkish, Persian, English among others in the past. Bengali, like all living languages, continues to integrate words from Hindi as well as English. 

Malviya should not have paid attention to Bengalis brangling over the finer points of dialects spoken in different districts of the Bengali homeland, that includes lands both west and east of the river Bhagirathi, a tributary of the Ganga that is the riverine boundary separating two of the four parts into which the geography of the people can be divided. Argumentative as Bengalis are, they brangle endlessly over the way Bengali is spoken in the different districts of the homeland. 

Scratch a Bengali, whose family originated in any one of the districts of what was East Bengal, and out will pop a spiel about the nuances of the dialect. Those who crossed the border any time before or after August 15, 1947 be they Hindus, Buddhists or Muslims brought their language, that is the dialect of the district, with them. Three generations later, under 30s continue to believe that the dialect they speak at home with parents and grandparents is a version of the original dialect, take pride in their ability to do so and have every intention of nurturing the language of their roots in the future.  

By eavesdropping on Bengalis talking about their dialects, an obsession of mostly those who originated across the Bhagirathi, that often goes to the extremes of declaring in the heat of an argument that there is nothing like a Bengali language, the BJP made a fundamental error by actually believing that there was nothing like a Bengali language. It confirmed as nothing else ever could that the BJP is an organisation that is trying to implant itself in West Bengal. Its inability to culturally comprehend the connection between language, identity, memory and history marks it as the stranger, the outsider forever

The project of ferreting out Bangladeshis based on language, dress and food is sinister. The politics of polarisation based on emphasising difference to separate and therefore divide people is being played by the BJP and is enabling the Trinamool Congress to declare itself as the champion of dialect diversity and standardised Bengali. 

The political tug of war over the identity, based on dialect and the variations within the dialect of certain words, like pani instead of jal  for water has other implications. It is a part of BJP’s ideological agenda of purification of the body politic from the contaminating influence of the Muslim-Mughal centuries. It is a way of deepening the divide by providing more reasons to people willing to be swayed by sentiment that polarisation is the principal issue rather than the politics of accountability for the acts and omissions of governance and policy.  

It is also noteworthy how the magnitude of the output on social media and television over the language-migration/infiltration/illegal immigrant issue has drowned out, for now, the Election Commission’s role and actions on using the Special Intensive Revision of electoral rolls in Bihar into a process of selectively disenfranchising people based on suspicion or doubt rather than substance and fact. The SIR process has shifted the onus of proof to the voter reversing the rule of law that requires the EC to prove that a person is a false voter. In doing so, the EC’s SIR has become a mechanism for determining citizenship. 

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